Regimented routines don't come easily

For most people, however, daily scheduled writing is neither an intuitive habit to adopt nor an easy one to sustain. As any drill sergeant or Mother Superior can attest, few humans possess the intrinsic self-discipline required to adhere to a strictly regimented routine day after day and week after week, no matter how beneficial its effects.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 18

For many writers, frustration and exhilaration are both part of the process

[T]he words frustrating, frustrated, and frustration so often accompanied narratives of accomplishment and even ecstasy—exhilaration, happiness, contentment—that I began to wonder whether, at least for some writers, frustration is a prerequisite for elation. Perhaps the pleasure of the breakthrough, the intensity of the flow, would lose some of its emotional force if writing were easy all the time.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 162

Academic writers should cross-train

Rather than regarding activities such as lecturing, blogging, and community engagement as time-sucking distractions from your research, try reconceptualizing them as muscle-building tonics instead. The more you cross-train by writing across genres as part of your everyday academic work, the better prepared you will be to adapt to new audiences when you write for publication.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 121

Academic writers have many, many writing habits

Productivity, I discovered, is a broad church that tolerates many creeds. Some successful academics write daily, others sporadically; some at home, others at work; soe on trains or airplanes or during children's sports practice, others in distraction-free environments; some on a word processor others in longhand or using voice-recognition software; some whenever they have a few minutes free, others only when they have cleared hours or days of uninterrupted time.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 15

Turns out you don't have to write daily to get stuff done

[R]oughly seven out of eight academics surveyed admitted that they do not write every day. Daily writing, it turns out, is neither a reliable marker not a clear predictor of productivity.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 15

Middle class can become fascist, says Orwell

It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 258 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Mechanization cuts you off from life, says Orwell

[I]n a fully mechanised world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as "art"; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanise the world as fully as it might be mechanised, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 230 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)